CellQ – an end to the amusement park queue nightmare?

CellQis a virtual queuing system that lets you book your place on a ride via mobile phone and get a call when your place is ready. Voila, no queues, no tantrums, just funs-ville. This is definitely straight from the ‘Oh why didn’t they think of this before?’ book, isn’t it? No doubt it involves extra ‘premium’ rate charges though. Tsk. [Thanks Kevin]

Using CellQ, visitors are free to move around the park, visit shops and restaurants, or just relax while they wait their turn. Their phone automatically calls them to the ride when they reach the head of the line. At the ride they enter through a special entrance and board almost immediately.

exept what do you do while you’re waiting for the call?
it’s not as though you can go on any other rides – you might get *the* call in the middle. So, you just wait. Which you may as well have done in the ‘traditional’ queue.
Does anywhere implement this? I’d be interested to know if it works in practice.

jordanab

Disney has had a service similar to this for years. You get to a kiosk outside the ride, swipe your barcoded park ticket, it spits out a ride ticket, the ticket has a time printed on it (45-90min later), you return at that time and go straight to the front of the line. The only caveat is that you can only do this for one ride at a time. The whole idea is to encourage you to spend money on food/souvineers/games rather than stand in lines all day long.